Unconventional Revision: MFA vs. Therapy

Related Books:

1.
For emerging writers, often the advice is “find your voice,” but it’s hard to know what that actually means. In the mid 2000s, I began seeking therapy for anxiety and depression, and my doctor gave me writing assignments: He’d ask me to fictionalize events in my real life that had been painful as a way to reframe the narratives. He’d also ask me to write happy endings or to write myself as the person I wanted to become, rather than the person I currently was.

Most writers are familiar with journaling, and many writers are familiar with writing in order to process. By the time I was in treatment, I already had an MFA—and with that came significant revision experience. But my therapy assignments dug deeper than anything I would have ever been willing to share in grad school workshops, and one of them became my first published work, another the opening story to my debut collection, and another the genesis for a novel. But before that, I was just another person on a psychiatrist’s couch.

2.

“I read this article,” I tell my psych, Dr. D., “About people who eat their own hair, and while it sounds pretty, uh, terrifying, I also wonder if it’s better to have a specific problem?”

“Sure,” he says, “Could be trichotillomania, or could be pica. Maybe something else. It’s not so scary if it’s what you need, by the way. Everyone has their own ways of coping.”

My doc actually wasn’t all that into diagnosis, or at least if he was, he wasn’t doing it with me. He prescribed me antidepressants, and when I said I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of taking a pill every day, he dismissed me, telling me that at some point, I’d want to flush the scrip, but for now, fill it. He reminded me that I had told him I was taking a regular antihistamine.

So, I filled it. That was at a time in my life when I also bought way too much makeup, because I was frequently wandering the aisles of Bartell’s while the pharmacy filled my Zoloft or Wellbutrin or Claritin or birth control. I would wait for my name to be called through the loudspeaker, and then go up to the counter with a jumble of lash extending mascara, pots of eye cream and face powder, and maybe something practical, toothpaste or bandages, a packet of dish sponges or a box of trash can liners.

I was trying. The pharmacy tech would ring up my purchases along with my script. I was lucky enough to have health insurance, so the ancillary products were usually more than my copay.

When I pushed Dr. D. again, a few weeks later, he pulled out his Diagnosis and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and thumbed to some page about unattached anxiety ­­­­and slid it across the floor from his upright seat to my reclined couch.

“Does that make you feel better?” he asked.

“No,” I said, because it didn’t.

I flipped the manual closed and looked at his huge collection of Legos. He sometimes saw children, I knew, but it wasn’t just the children who played with the Legos. When I asked him once why he had so very many baskets of Legos, he said that he wanted to see what people would build if they were not restricted by their materials. “What do they make?” I asked. “A lot of things,” he said. “But, mostly houses with no windows and no doors.”

3.

“I read this thing,” I say to Dr. D. “About how people who are diagnosed with terminal illness experience manic productivity, how it reorganizes their life.”

At this point, outside of Dr. D.’s writing prompts, I’d really not written anything in years. His exercises were the only connection I had to the page, and my reading was confined to magazines. Though I had always loved novels, story collections, and sprawling autobiographies, I didn’t have, at the time, the concentration for anything over a couple thousand words.

“Sure,” he says. “That happens.”

In the same session, I read one of the assignments: to write about my body. I share a story about a girl who is knit together with bird feathers and beeswax, with a hybrid heart cobbled from bits of offal bound by fired clay and wrapped in rags. How the parents of this girl are present at her making, along with the potter and the forge worker and the weaver and the glassblower, and the local seamstress who stitches it all together at no charge.

Reading those old paragraphs now, it’s not hard to identify the ache I had and the feeling of deep disconnection from everyday life paired with blood connection to my folks. I probably spent a dozen hours on those two pages, trying to translate the idea from brain to paper.

On a creaky old sofa, my creaky old doctor offers me an affirmation.

“Good,” he says. “That’s good.”

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Yes Please

4.
The thing is, the experience I had with mental health services was actually ultimately positive.

“Dr. D?,” I ask. “You must have had patients who have suicided, right?”

He pauses. “It’s part of the work I do.”

To be clear, while many times I wanted to disappear, I never wanted to die. I tell Dr. D. this. I ask him if I’m not suicidal, do I really need to be in weekly therapy. I’m being disingenuous. Even I know that there is a large difference between sad and jumping, and I’m somewhere deep in the middle.

“You tell me,” he says. “You came here on your own.”

5.

The final sentences I take to Dr. D. are much more fully formed than anything else I have brought to his office. Structured in three parts, I think it’s the best thing I have written in my life to date. I feel the same way I felt when I handed in my master’s thesis, scared and tentatively proud.

We only have enough time for me to read through the first part before we need to move onto the insurance-covered portions of our session, which turns out to be our last. Dr. D. says he thinks that I should stay in talk therapy, but we’ve done all we can do together. And I haven’t yet flushed the meds, but I’m feeling close.

I actually don’t think he’s wrong, but I’m terrified to seek out a new therapist and highly concerned about finding someone who respects my writing life in the same way. This feels critical in a way I hadn’t known before.

A month later, I print out the same pages on clean paper and mail it to a handful of lit mags. A week later Howard Junker leaves a message on my answering machine. He says ZYZZYVA will publish me if I rewrite a bit. “Put it in the first person,” Junker says. “Bring the narrative in closer.” He is right, as editors often are.

I do the rewrite and the piece runs. I get my contributor copies. I read my own bound work, silently, to myself, when it arrives in the mail.

I don’t have a new therapist yet, just a prescription with two refills and too much eyeshadow I will never wear.

I don’t know yet that it will take me another decade to publish my slim debut, don’t know that two novels will follow relatively immediately.

Of those patients who built Lego structures of houses with no windows and no doors, of course, I was one, though I put a porch on my house, a little space to walk up, a place to knock. I can’t say now if that was hope or hubris or the memory of the back deck on my childhood home where in the dead heat of summer my brother and I used to drag our mattresses out to so we could sleep in the cool high-country air.

What I finally understand is that I could have never shown up to a traditional writing workshop with the same bag of guts, no way I could have shaped that rawness into narrative if I were revising while receiving group feedback from under the “cone of silence,” a tenant of some writing workshops where the person being workshopped may not speak while their work is being discussed. While I value my MFA immensely, it was a lesson in craft and the academic practice of art; therapy was a lesson in starting to understand why I wanted to write in the first place and how to use art to excavate ideas and feelings that had been buried.

Now, my novel, If the Ice Had Held, has just come out, and for someone who has always been a pretty good sleeper, I am waking up in the middle of the night, worrying about what reviewers will say and have said, which really has mostly been kind. I’m worrying about how the sales will be; I’m worrying about people in my life who might recognize parts of themselves in my work—it’s fiction, the book is not thinly or otherwise disguised memoir, but it’s still informed by my own experience—because my writing both before and after therapy has always been a way to surface and process internal life. This book feels personal in a different way than my others. It feels more public. It feels more colored by the time I spent on Dr. D.’s sofa, trying to parse through murky recollections and the way that memory shifts over time. How he would say some version of, “It doesn’t matter what actually happened. It matters how you feel about it now,” and I would think, But I want facts!, even though I knew that’s not how life works.

Fiction is like that as well: it’s about emotional truth rather than the reporting of a timeline or the transcribed recording of an event. Perhaps learning to negotiate plot and structure and the scaffolding of a novel while tackling loss, secrets, and the things that prevent us from caring for one another—in other words, part of what sent me to therapy in the first place—is what finding my voice has been all about.

In the last few months, Alaska has been brutal to people I know. A friend who’s so knowledgeable about the wilderness he teaches college classes on the subject got mauled by a bear on a mountain outside Haines. The outdoors-savvy boyfriend of a friend disappeared while running or hiking outside Nome. A bush pilot I flew with last year crashed into Admiralty Island; he and all but one of the passengers died.

But if Alaska can be brutal, it can also be transcendent. Another friend recently caught a beautiful king salmon with a fly she tied herself; the photo of her holding it conveys a form of worship. Earlier this summer, I traveled to Admiralty Island — Kootznoowoo, or “fortress of the bears” in Lingít, the indigenous language of the area. For hours, we watched male and female brown bears court — running away, snarling, following each other as if they were connected by an ever-shortening rope. For the last few years, my boyfriend and I have packed inflatable boats, food, and our tent and floated down a different river in Alaska or the Yukon — the Pelly, the Big Salmon, the Nisutlin, the Stikine. We’ve listened to a dozen wolves howl and bark on each side of the river around us long into the night. We’ve watched a pack of them ghost in and out of the trees, barely visible as they run. We’ve seen kingfishers beat in place above the water, ravens chase ospreys, a cow moose sheltering her two calves as she watched us float by, black and brown bears eating sedges.

Many fiction writers get wilderness wrong.

I recently received a copy of Dave Eggers’s newest book, Heroes of the Frontier, which is set in Alaska. I like Eggers’s books. I first read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius in high school, when my love for it verged on the babbling. I appreciate the generous, expansive nature of his writing, and because he’s Dave Eggers, I really enjoyed everything about the new book that relates to people. Josie, the protagonist, is complicated, believable, moving, frequently hilarious — so is the way she interacts with others. The towns, and their quirky, touristy craziness, ring true.

This is not the case for the wilderness. At one point in the book, Josie watches a water snake emerge from a river and eat a snail. The only problem? There are no snakes in Alaska. In a later section, Josie and her two children pause to watch “a ten point buck.” Only problem? There are no “ten point bucks” in interior Alaska. Every now and then mule deer stray over from Canada, but when they do they’re so unusual people write newspaper articles about them. A “ten-point buck?” No.

In the first ten pages, Josie and the kids drive through an animal park that advertises its Alaskan mammals. They see “a pair of moose, and their new calf, none of them stirring.” I realize this is a zoo, but male moose do not hang around with their calves. They saw “an antelope, spindly and stupid; it walked a few feet before stopping to look forlornly into the grey mountains beyond. Its eyes said, Take me, Lord. I am now broken.” Again, a zoo, but there are no antelope in Alaska. If it wanted to flee into the Alaskan mountains it would find itself just as lonely and would die of cold, wolves, or starvation come winter. When they’re finished with the zoo, a ranger points “to a mountain range nearby, where, he said, there was a rare thing: a small group of bighorn sheep, cutting a horizontal line across the ridge, east to west.” Bighorn sheep do not live in Alaska. Alaska has Dall sheep, which are a different species.

To most Alaskans, these are big mistakes. But when reading Heroes of the Frontier, I was also thinking about something more intangible — the nature of a place versus the nature of a story set in that place.

Much of the novel is set on the road, but at the end Josie and her two children, Paul and Ana, decide to go for a hike. It ends up taking much longer than they anticipated, and they’re unprepared. There is lightning. It begins to rain; they get soaked. They decide not to go back the way they’ve come, but to run from copse of trees to copse of trees, somehow staying on the trail. If there’s one thing indicated by the very large number of people that get lost and die or have to be rescued in the Alaskan wilderness every year, it’s that it is very easy to accidentally veer off-trail, especially if the trail is not well traveled or near a city, especially if it’s not the best of circumstances. But somehow, despite the fact that they’re literally running for their lives during a massive storm, Josie and the kids keep finding clues as to where they’re going.

There’s something described as “an avalanche,” though its only elements seem to be rock and shale — Josie slides across it on her back with her upper body clad in only a bra, but Eggers never mentions snow, ice or cold. Somehow, Josie and her children make it to a cabin she didn’t realize was there when they began the hike. It is decked out with balloons and a feast for the “Stromberg Family Reunion.” I can get with a cabin; a cabin can be the deus ex machina of real-life salvation. But a cabin decorated and then abandoned, miles and an arduous hike into the wilderness, containing a table “overflowing with juices and sodas, chips, fruit and a glorious chocolate cake under a plastic canopy?” I wanted to believe in this cabin — I hope there is a cabin like that out there for all of us — but I could think of too many people for whom this cabin didn’t exist.

I am by no means immune to the perils of writing wilderness myself. I recently showed a new chapter in my novel-in-revision to my boyfriend Bjorn, a life-long Alaskan. In it, a young girl wanders around lost on Chichagof Island. It was the chapter he liked least.

“She would be afraid,” he said. “When does she start feeling like prey?”

My problem was that I wanted my character to be challenged, but like Eggers, I hadn’t accounted for the reality of the place that would challenge her.

A few years ago, Bjorn and I hiked the 33-mile Chilkoot Trail, the route many would-be miners took to the Yukon during the Klondike Gold Rush. It was before the official start of the season, and except for a very fit German guy in his mid-twenties, we were the only hikers. We spent the first night at Sheep Camp, the last stop before the pass; the German guy woke before us, and we followed his tracks the rest of the day. We summited the pass in a late-May snowstorm on steps Bjorn cut with his ice ax and emerged from the clouds into what a Canadian ranger we’d passed called “a bluebird day.” It was surreal. We were still using our snowshoes, but bumblebees buzzed around us and landed on the snow. We started steaming. We followed the route the snowshoe-wearing rangers had flagged…right over a half-frozen pond. The German guy hadn’t brought snowshoes, and we could see the hole where he’d fallen through up to his waist, the drag marks where he’d pulled himself out. As we walked, we saw his footsteps — he’d been post-holing, sinking through the deep snow up to his crotch with each step. Post-holing makes for incredibly miserable walking. A few miles later, we saw a tiny figure waving to us frantically. The German guy hadn’t brought sunglasses, and his eyes were hurting; he was going snow-blind. Bjorn gave him an extra pair. The rangers had told him they’d marked the trail to Happy Camp, and he was wondering if he’d taken a wrong turn. We got out our GPS and figured out we were on the snow-covered trail, but the rangers had stopped flagging two or three miles short.

That is what happens in wilderness when you are unprepared — even with a flagged route on a trail thousands have walked before, even if you are experienced. You don’t magically find a party-food-filled abandoned cabin decorated for a family reunion, complete with a sheet cake under a protective dome. You end up miserable and wet and exhausted and snow-blind and far from where you’ve tried to be, and if you’re lucky, it’s a sunny day and there are other people around who can help you. It’s a transformative experience to realize how vulnerable, and how lucky, you are.

The idea of owing more to luck than courage, however, contradicts one of the basic themes of Heroes of the Frontier — that through acting bravely and persevering, you and those around you (in Josie’s case, Paul and Ana) can become the “heroes” of the title. That conflict is one of the difficulties of writing wilderness in fiction. Wilderness is what it is, not what a book requires it to be. The Alaskan wilderness challenges people in ways they don’t anticipate, and it is not kind to the inexperienced and underprepared, no matter how “brave” they might be.

Last year, I went to a panel in which Juneau writer Ernestine Hayes, author of Blonde Indian, said “A sense of place arises from the place itself… it is (not) a panorama to be conquered.” I thought of this as I read these lines, after Josie and company arrive at the cabin: “Every part of their being was awake. Their minds were screaming in triumph, their arms and legs wanted more challenge, more conquest, more glory.” At the end of Heroes of the Frontier, Alaska is a panorama conquered.

Ultimately, the novel is about a woman escaping the fears, restrictions and regrets of her life and trying to shape her children into good, brave people, like those she imagines live in Alaska. It’s an admirable goal. But both in towns and out of them, Josie, Paul and Ana seem charmed. In the wild, that means Eggers’s Alaska loses something essential to itself.

So here are some questions. Where is the line between artistic license and error? If we take liberties with the character of a place and we are aware of it, should we acknowledge that we’ve done so? This isn’t nonfiction, after all, and in spite of its bighorn sheep, Heroes of the Frontier is an enjoyable story.

Writers who write wilderness have a responsibility to it, partly because so many of us are disconnected from it, and partly because it’s been misrepresented so often. We’ve now constructed so much of the world — even in our national parks — that most of us never experience real wilderness, a place you can’t see from the road. It exists with or without us. It means only and incredibly itself, and when we are there, we become a part of it — something that can be terrifying, or exhilarating, or both.

There is lots of insightful, beautiful writing about Alaskan and northern wilderness, both fiction and nonfiction — see Seth Kantner, Sherry Simpson, Velma Wallis, a vast array of others. There are people who write wilderness gorgeously outside the context of Alaska as well — Louise Erdrich, Cormac McCarthy. If there’s anything wilderness can teach you, it’s the dizzying breadth of what you do not know, and if what you write is to resonate as true there is no lesson more important. So if you’re going to write wilderness, experience it. Respect it. Be prepared and scared and awestruck and relieved. Research. Fact check. Then represent the place you are writing as honestly as you can. You owe it to a world that has lost a sense of true wild.

1.
In the opening montage for Orange Is the New Black, the made-for-Netflix series based on Piper Kerman’smemoir of the same name, disembodied lips of different races and ethnicities mouth the words to Regina Spektor’s song “You’ve Got Time.” The message is clear: we are all the same (we all have lips, I suppose). The faces are both stripped of identity, yet are identifiably female. The introduction sets the stage for the show’s focus on the idea of a universal feminine experience. From the illicit groping between Piper (played by Taylor Schilling) and Alex (Laura Prepon) to the hair salon run by Sophia (the awesome Laverne Cox), the show treats its viewers to a titillating version of female camaraderie that might exist on the WB or in the catalogues of a Seven Sisters college.

In fact, Piper Kerman (renamed “Chapman” for the Netflix series) invites the comparison to an all-women’s collegiate experience herself in her memoir. “I was surviving,” she writes about her time in a federal correctional facility in Danbury, Conn., “perhaps [because] I had gone to an elite women’s college. Single-sex living has certain constants, whether it’s upscale or down and dirty…There was less bulimia and more fights…but the same feminine ethos was present — empathetic camaraderie and bawdy humor on good days, and histrionic drama…on bad.”

The series reflects this same “all women be crazy” ethos, and the comparison to college dormitory living does seems apt. The viewing experience is really a lot like Felicity in its gossipy will-they-or-won’t-they feel, down to the symbolic meaning attributed to hairstyles (for some reason, this is the sine qua non of feminine culture on popular television). It’s also deliciously, compulsively watchable, not just because the acting is compelling, but also because it reinforces what the audience would like to view as a universal truth: there isn’t much difference between people on the inside and people on the outside. The success of both the show and the memoir evince the public’s current insatiable thirst for prison narratives — so long as they aren’t too violent or dirty. (Kerman inoculates her memoir, and the show, against any charges of girl-on-girl sexual assault: Oz this is not.) Still, one wonders, is this perceived similarity between those on the inside and us on the outside just to make us (liberal, middle-class, educated) feel better (or worse) about the prison state that is the U.S., circa now?

2.The prison narrative has been around for a long time. Not only have great authors spent time in prison (Thomas More, Marquis de Sade) but great works have also been written about prisons (The Count of Monte Cristo, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich). “Prison lit,” as a dedicated genre consisting of first-person accounts of trial and punishment, seems to have come about around the 16th century as large numbers of literate, educated dissenters spent time behind bars; they wrote as a way to spark conversation about the role of incarceration in society. Not coincidentally, the 16th century also saw the rise of imprisonment as legal punishment. On top of the religious and political minorities, there were also greater numbers of vagrants and debtors who were locked up.

Similarly, the American tradition of “prison lit” has its roots in social protest. Thoreau, in Resistance to Civil Government, wrote that, “[u]nder a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison,” launching the idealistic notion that great thinking and writing come from behind prison walls. Early 20th century prison writings were generally by activists who sought to expose the inequities of the justice system. My Life in Prison by Donald Lowrie was one of the first widely-read first-person accounts of prison life. Lowrie was sentenced to 15 years at San Quentin for burglary (he was out in 10 on good behavior). Lowrie attempts to chronicle the daily humiliations of prison life while also maintaining the idea that he wasn’t a born criminal, but rather a victim of bad circumstances that conspired against him: “And despite a long term in prison, I am not yet a criminal.” He separates himself and his fellow inmates from their crimes: “But I know that all men are human.” This idea of a constant humanity resonates with the same appeal as other “outsider” narratives.

During the Civil Rights era, prison literature became a way to unite both individual struggles with political ones, although the works were arguably still the product of a few great minds. The Autobiography of Malcom X, for example, galvanized a movement. Eldridge Cleaver’sSoul on Icesimilarly links the African-American male prison experience with the greater historical atrocities of colonialism and slavery, crimes where African-Americans lost their ability to move freely. Malcolm Braly’sOn the Yard, published in 1967, is heralded as one of the greatest prison novels, reveling in psychological verity and presenting an array of criminal “types” familiar to any outside audience today.

Unsurprisingly, the rise of prison narratives in America coincided with a dramatic increase in prison populations during the ’70s, putatively as a reaction to the anti-establishment mores of the ’60s. This trend continues today at least partially because of popular anti-crime campaigns, the “war on drugs” and “tough on crime” political rhetoric. Various memoirs and stories emerged to expose the horrendous conditions of most penitentiaries; not coincidentally, many of them focus on social conditions preceding incarceration, like poverty, lack of family support, substance abuse, homelessness, and exposure to criminal activity. Many of these narratives are written by African American writers addressing a presumptively white audience and take on a semi-educational stance not unlike slave narratives: John Edgar Wideman’sBrothers and Keepers (1984), for example, in addition to the works mentioned above.

One role of the prison narrative is to combat the dehumanizing process that is the modern prison system. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault explained incarceration as a way for the State to maintain its absolute power and authority over its citizens. Certainly, penal institutions try their very best to effectively erase the individual as we know it. For this reason, prisons separate inmates by race, women are housed separately from men, and a series of bureaucratic trials are imposed — bodies are counted at certain times of day, sleeping situations are altered, and procedural delays are rampant. Some states also have versions of various laws that prevent author-inmates from profiting off of their writing, which limits free expression, a Constitutional ideal that we profess to hold dear.

It makes sense, then, that prison literature today seeks to reaffirm the triumph of the human spirit, so to speak. Kerman, as an example, continually reasserts her ability to maintain her can-do pluckiness: “I hated the control the prison exercised over my life, but the only way to fight it was in my head.” Rather than dwell on her misfortune or become too accustomed to prison life, Kerman stages a protest, Oprah-style: no one can keep her down. She still has her favorite things: her radio, her running, her prison “cheesecake,” and the companionship of the other women.

At the same time, the inmate-author is in a unique position to testify as to the conditions and injustices rampant in the system. Interestingly, contemporary prison narratives rarely claim that incarceration is wrong in itself, but rather focus on cruel and inhumane treatment. Kerman relates in detail the administrative nightmare that is the judicial process — she pleads guilty and surrenders but must wait over a year for her sentence to begin. Yet, she does not ever argue that she did not deserve punishment. The PEN Prison Writing Program’s website includes thoughtful essays about concerns like solitary confinement and the death penalty without exhorting the reader to rethink the concept of the penitentiary more generally. No one, it seems, wants to argue that murderers and rapists don’t belong in prison.

For example, in writing about the death penalty, J. Michael Stanfield Jr. speaks directly to us, the outsiders: “Okay, so maybe I’m coming off as just a tad bit facetious here, but it doesn’t change the fact that murder, even the government-approved variety, is still murder, by the very definition of the law. What’s more (and I’m going out on a limb here), capital punishment is immoral, and it’s a sin of our modem, civilized society.” The reader of this cannot help but be morally implicated, particularly since the political reality is that prisoners cannot vote (and most states limit the ability of ex-felons to vote in some manner). In Stanfield’s piece, the reader, who is viewed as potentially complicit with the government, becomes an agent for moral decision-making: we can decide that murder, in all its varieties, is immoral and, therefore, seek to eliminate the death sentence. Yet, Stanfield doesn’t argue that crimes (like murder) are undeserving of punishment; in fact, he says quite the opposite.

Prison narratives exert their moral authority by emphasizing their “truth.” Whether the piece is fiction or not, readers want to feel as though the information or story is conveyed with some deeper understanding, similar to the way readers want to read about war but never actually want to go there. One way that present-day prison writing emphasizes the notion of “truth” is by sheer volume. Infamous bastions like San Quentin publish anthologies of inmates’ stories and verse, and the PEN Program fosters prison writing’s “restorative and rehabilitative” powers and sponsors writing contests. Wally Lamb has assembled two anthologies (Couldn’t Keep It to Myself and I’ll Fly Away) of work by women inmates in a Connecticut women’s maximum-security prison. In these cases, the emphasis is on a collection of writing, a community on the inside speaking truth to us on the outside. Rather than one great writer, like Thomas More, writing for a small intellectual elite, these anthologies are mass marketed for a consumer audience of liberals. We cannot deny the power of these stories because there are just too many of them; however, the highly consumable quality of the publications — not entirely unlike the idea of watching a whole season of Orange at one sitting — makes it less likely we will act.

3.
In truth, the American prison system is in crisis. The number of people in prison since the 1980s has more than tripled, to 751 per 100,000 people (that’s nearly 1 percent of our population). The U.S. puts more people behind bars than any other country in the world. We house half of the world’s prison population. Over half of those in prison are African-American or Hispanic. There are more black men within the various incarnations of incarceration — prison, probation or parole — than there were slaves during the height of slavery. For many urban, minority communities, prison is simply a fact of everyday life (as is prison rape, if evidenced by the number of times detectives on Law & Order: SVU threaten accused rapists and pedophiles with it). The penitentiary is both a subculture and the dominant culture all in one.

Whatever you may think about the causes of the prison population explosion or what should be done about it, America has long held contradictory views about incarceration. On the one hand, incarceration is perhaps ideally all about rehabilitation: after a certain amount of time (not necessarily commensurate with the mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines), we assume or believe, given evidence, that an offender can grow to regret his crimes and become a productive member of society.

There are a lot of problems with that view, not the least of which being that overcrowded prisons seem unlikely to produce anything productive. It does, however, explain the surge in prison programs that teach inmates job training, anger management, art, drama, music, writing, etc. The idea is that these programs reduce recidivism, and most of them seem to do so. Reducing recidivism is popular among the public and politicians alike — while no one wants to be seen as “soft on crime” (especially when it comes to violent offenders — it’s a bit easier to make the case for nonviolent offenses), arguing that programs prevent ex-cons from returning to prison reduces costs all around.

But rehabilitation is at war with the other main ideology driving prison sentencing, retribution. In other words, people should be punished for what they do. This is, after all, the American way — submitting oneself to a greater authority (God and/or the state), manfully accepting that one has done wrong and deserves punishment. In his book Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire, author Robert Perkinson traces this foundation back to slavery — subjugate, discipline, punish (especially African-Americans).

Yet, even more contrarily, the manner in which prisons dehumanize individuals — stripping them of possessions, bodily integrity, identity, community, and dignity — confuses the issue of retribution. If someone who commits a crime is a monster, someone with whom we don’t want to identify, then the arduous procedural elements of the criminal justice process — the hearings, the trial, the parole board hearings, the write-ups for good or bad behavior, the psychological profiles — simply impede the public’s desire for good old retribution. Hangings in the public square at least are consistent, and possibly more humane than solitary confinement in a supermax. As some said, or thought, when Ariel Castro hung himself in his cell, good riddance. In other words, he was so subhuman that he didn’t deserve the chance to be stripped of his humanity. It’s often even the same voices who so quickly demonize unlikable offenders — people who, say, shoot down innocent civilians in a movie theater or plant bombs at the end of the Boston marathon — that will also exhort the virtues of rehabilitation. Furthermore, advances in science may well indicate that the causes of violent behavior are at least partially biological, which may mean that rehabilitation is simply asking the wrong questions.

Retribution is fundamentally inconsistent with rehabilitation. Retribution relies on a theory of individual choice, arguing that wrong-doers deserve punishment, while rehabilitation accepts that some people may not have been capable of making other choices at that moment (but they should know better in the future once they are schooled in guilt). You cannot think that people deserve to be punished for wrongdoing and simultaneously believe that people who commit offenses are wrong-headed and need guidance to find the proper path. And, yet, we do.

4.
You can see these conflicting ideologies within any prison memoir. In the PEN anthologies and others like it, the author chooses how much he would like to reveal about his crime and the events which landed him in prison. Does it affect our reading of the work? It only seems to serve as a way to further sell the outside audience on an authentic experience while also making the author an autonomous agent capable of self-reflection, even though that self-reflection is state-imposed. Part of the current allure of the authorial gesture in contemporary prison writing is that the writer is permitted to become someone else — the past is in the past. As the tagline of an O magazine article on Wally Lamb’s work with inmate-writers states: “In prison, they are robbers and murders. On paper, they are women not so different from the rest of us.” Even if the crime is revealed, usually a redemptive gesture follows to argue that this crime merely represents one bad decision or moment; the writer’s life is (or now is) composed of more than that.

This rehabilitative gesture allows us, the readers, to see the inmate as like us on the outside (presumably the readership of O magazine does not include large numbers of incarcerated individuals). I was at a performance in San Quentin where inmate-actors all gave their own short pieces based on their life experiences. Someone in the audience said, “It made me think about my own life.” This move — my, he is relatable/yes, I am just like you — explains the enduring appeal of these narratives. Wouldn’t we all like to truly understand our motives and improve ourselves if only we had the time to do so? And in order to make this mental turn, to go from seeing oneself as worthless to worthy of someone’s time and attention, requires a belief in personal agency, both the ability to commit crimes of one’s own free will and to seek forgiveness for them. The writer must feel the pain of his acts, an action consistent with parole board hearing where an inmate must express requisite apologies.

At the same time, a prison narrative must reinforce its boundaries, physical and emotional. In other words, since the very function of a prison is to display the mighty power of the state, a prison narrative must focus on the day-to-day, mundane nature of life behind bars. In Kerman’s memoir, I lost count of the number of times she runs around the track. Bray’s novel spends many pages on the mundane details of prison life alongside the portrayal of each character’s inner struggles. The potential for growth in a prison narrative comes from the interior journey. Since prison, by its very nature, circumscribes a person’s ability to move freely (and is very, very boring), writers have ample opportunity to reflect on past events and motivations.

5.
Part of what makes Orange so interesting is the fact that Piper Kerman is the presumptive consumer of her own material. She is white, liberal, educated, scornful of the trappings of uneducated femininity (like big weddings), with just a bit of a wild streak (which I like to fancy I have myself). This places her in the unique position to both testify to her own dehumanizing treatment and advocate for the better treatment for others who cannot achieve her level of discourse.

It’s a forgone conclusion that Piper is dreadfully sorry for what she has done. She writes this over and over. Yet, is this memoir a rehabilitative one? Did Piper need to spend 16 months in a federal prison to learn that being involved in a drug cartel was a bad idea? Per the book, no. Piper spends little time dwelling on why she made that decision — instead, at moments, she seems to glorify the freewheeling, thug life she had. She very judiciously states that she is “no better” than anyone else she meets in prison.

And yet, in saying so, she clearly marks herself as not from the inside. Her time in prison is like a student spending a study abroad trip in South America, a dip into an exotic culture. What about the other inmates? Do they exercise the same autonomous agency that Kerman claims she possesses? Both the show and the books seem to argue no. The other inmate characters’ crimes are as accidents, the wrong place at the wrong time, born of circumstances like poverty, homelessness, and drug addiction. The show deals with this neatly — it provides each character an intriguing backstory, giving them psychological motives for their crimes, but also humanizing them, so that the audience can imagine, if they wish, that the characters have the ability to reclaim their non-criminal individual identities. Yet Kerman/Chapman herself never wrestles with this question of her own agency, so she is always an outsider, placing any authenticity of her claim to self-improvement in question.

Since the writing of the memoir and the production of the Netflix series, Kerman mostly devotes herself to advocating for improvement in prison conditions, a worthy goal. Certainly, Kerman and other writers of prison narratives are not defending the current penal system; the contradictions in their narratives are related to the contradictions inherent in the criminal justice system. But as a consumer audience, we can wonder whether these works really serve the political purposes they’d like.

We must acknowledge that, like all creative works, prison narratives are intended for consumption by readers like us. Do we read them just to exorcise our guilt? That seems to take away from the profoundly moving nature of the genre. Whether it’s because people are seeking authenticity of individual expression in an era where so much feels prepackaged and marketed or whether it’s because incarceration speaks to some kind of universal human experience, I am not sure. But the emotions are not manufactured. During the performance I attended at San Quentin, people in the audience were profoundly, genuinely moved — I saw tears and handholding, a vast swelling of catharsis among the non-incarcerated audience. Even I wanted to believe.

As the media phenomenon du jour, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has put pressure on the commentariat to provide Potter-related context or controversy – anything to get readers to spend a few minutes with us, rather than J.K. Rowling! And herein lies a danger: in our zeal to ride Harry’s coattails (broomstick?) to glory, we Muggles are tempted to wave a wand over our own preconceptions and imagine them transfigured into news. In that vein, an article in last week’s Washington Post provoked our interest here at The Millions, while contradicting my own sense of how the Potter books function within the enchanted kingdom of childhood. I specifically remembered Cynthia Oakes, a middle-school librarian at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, telling me some years ago about a book her students had gone wild for, and recommending I check out Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Hoping to get some ground-level perspective on Pottermania, I got in touch with her (which wasn’t hard; she’s my mother-in-law) and asked if she’d mind revisiting the Potter books in a bit more depth. I had misplaced my Quick-Quotes Quills, but she graciously consented to be interviewed through the magic of email. [Editor’s note: Scroll down to view Oakes’ post-Hogwarts syllabus.]Opening the Chamber of Secrets“There is a wonderful bookstore in Hyde Park,” Oakes told me, “57th Street Books, where my colleagues and I often go to buy the latest children’s and young-adult titles. The children’s buyer at the time, author Franny Billingsley (The Folk Keeper), told us that there was a new British fantasy novel out, and the word in England was that it was wildly popular. We bought a copy, read it, liked it, recommended it to a couple of kids, and put it on our summer reading list. By the end of the summer, the idea of our introducing anyone to Harry Potter was beyond laughable. That’s how quickly it became a phenomenon. Kids told kids, who told other kids, who told still more kids – and that was that.”Initially, adults were out of the loop – which was great! It was remarkable, from my point of view, to see any book capture these kids’ imaginations and hearts so completely.” Oakes offered some further context: “This was right around time that the term ‘digital natives’ was being coined. As school librarians we were being led to believe that the future, and especially our future, lay in the Internet – that students were no longer interested in print. Then the iPod came out; once again, we were told that the future lay in digital whatever… and suddenly our middle school library alone had to buy seven copies of Sorcerer’s Stone. All copies were instantly checked out and the hold list was huge.“Then kids learned that the sequel was out in England. It was unprecedented to have them beg their parents to plan summer vacations to the UK around the publication of a book. One family, who actually did vacation in the UK that summer, brought back a copy of Chamber of Secrets. We ended up buying four copies of the next two installments. After that, kids were buying the books for themselves so we didn’t need to invest quite so heavily in order to provide access. We now have two shelves of the library devoted to six titles. I’m not sure if we’ll need to buy more than one copy of the latest book, since the sales of this title have been astronomical. I can assure you that no other series even come close to it in popularity.”Apropos of families vacationing across the pond, Oakes said she couldn’t generalize about any connections between the books’ success and social class. But as Chicago’s Lab School is a well-regarded private school, she could attest to the books’ strong appeal to upper-middle class, affluent kids. That appeal, she noted, “doesn’t seem to be contingent upon gender or race.”A Hogwarts of the Mind“I think what makes these books so seductive,” Oakes told me, “is that the world Rowling has created is a world kids really, really, really want to live in. Actually live in, not just imagine living in. They want to eat the candy, ride the train, wear the uniforms, own the brooms, play the games, study the magic, get mail from the owls, look at the maps, and spy from the folds of an invisible cape. Who wouldn’t want to be a member of the Weasley family? And who wouldn’t want Ron, Hermione, or Harry for a friend? Or Hagrid for a teacher? I am always amazed at how even a 14-year-old will still harbor the secret hope that Hogwarts is real.” Oakes remembers “being quite surprised when a fifth-grader confided in me that he was not able to get the spells to work. He wondered what he was doing wrong and he looked so forlorn while furtively whispering all this to me.”From a literary point of view, I’m not the first person to observe that these books are unique in combining the most popular of children’s literary genres into one rollicking story: horror, sports, adventure, school story, fantasy, romance, animal fantasy, family problems, etc. That gives them appeal among a broad array of readers. In addition, they are page-turners for kids who love plot-driven books and have satisfying characters for kids who prefer character-driven novels. It doesn’t hurt that the central character is a misfit without parents… a key ingredient to most successful children’s lit. What child, tethered to family and home, wouldn’t love to step through a magic portal where she instantly becomes the hero of the universe?“One must also remark on their unusual length. A 900-page kids book? Unheard of. And equally rare is a sequel that doesn’t have an ‘our-story-so-far’ component. Rowling rightly acknowledges the depth of her fans’ understanding of all the previous books by jumping right into the thick of the story. It is very difficult to read Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban without having read Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets. And if you are starting with Book Seven, forget it!”Dark Art“My experience has taught me that kids will rarely choose to read a book that isn’t entertaining and will avoid an instructive book as if it had spattergroit,” Oakes continued. “This isn’t to say that they avoid books with ideas. I harbor the belief that they prefer them. The Potter books are entertaining, but darkly so. They deal with real evil – Voldemort is crueler than the cruelest classmate. Harry has to wrestle with whatever part he may have played in his own parents’ death. Thoughtless actions in these books have far-reaching and horrific consequences.”This is also more psychologically nuanced fantasy world than many contemporary books offer, with every character suffering from his own particular character flaw. Yet a truly noble and ethical solution to every problem is always apparent. I believe that our kids long for that sort of clearly delineated ethical world.They are discovering that the adults around them, much like Dumbledore, are not perfect. They want their friends, just like Ron, always to return to them. And they want Harry to make the right choices (perhaps because if he does, then they will). The books instruct, then, in the way the best books do: by allowing the characters to fail. Whether or not the Potter books are helping to define anyone’s moral universe, I can’t tell. But contrary to the opinions of some commentators, they surely aren’t destroying anyone’s moral universe…”She ventured a critique: “I know the books are flawed, and most of the books – certainly Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, could have used a seriously talented editor. Or just an editor.” Still, she said, “They are remarkable. It’s not popular to admit it, but when I read the first book I had to get up at three a.m. to finish it. As an unreconstructed bibliophile, of course I love these books… I am a fan.”Fresh out of veritaserum, I tested the truth of this last assertion by asking Oakes some targeted questions. Her favorite character? “As a woman and an educator, I have to love Professor McGonagall.” Favorite villain(s)? “The dementors. I’ve certainly run across my share of soul-suckers and they scare me to death.” Favorite setting? “I love Hogwarts and wish that I worked there. It has an amazing library and I would love to recommend books to Hermione. And have her recommend a few to me! Not to mention the fact that I’d get to hide from and/or fight trolls, death-eaters, and so on.”Ordinary Wizarding Levels (O.W.L.s)“Most assuredly there is a social aspect to the Harry Potter phenomenon,” Oakes said. “Kids sit around for HOURS discussing all the ins and outs of the books. They join online discussion groups, download podcasts, and know every website devoted to Harry. They create group Halloween costumes. In fact, fans were so enthralled by the books that they rushed into the library (en masse) the second, the very second, the cover art for Book Seven had been revealed. We had to display it at the circulation desk. (I mean, our credibility would have taken a serious nose dive if we hadn’t.) Then, they congregated around the printout of the cover and discussed THAT for hours.”I asked her if kids outgrow Harry. “Some students lose interest (or say they do), but a remarkable number do not. I overheard many conversations in the high school hallway prior to Book Seven that centered around horcruxes, Harry, and death. Our high-school librarians have all the Potter books on the shelves. The fifth grade to whom we recommended the first book graduated last year. So most of these kids grew up reading Harry Potter. I’ve watched high-school students sneak back into the middle school library to keep up on their favorite series books and their favorite authors. And I say, good for them!” No Argus Filch, my mother-in-law.”As for the hoopla,” she said, “the books have been very good for children and for young-adult publishing… Their sheer popularity forced The New York Times to create a children’s literature bestseller list. (Ha!) These days our kids are reading just as much as – if not more than – they did before.”As we’d discussed, “J.K. Rowling came at a crucial moment… However, I do wish the publishers would realize there isn’t going to be another Harry Potter and ease up on all the fantasy that’s coming down the pike. I worry that really good young-adult novels are getting overlooked. The hoopla has also turned off many new young readers. Whereas the initial impetus to read the books came from kids, there’s now a huge media machine cramming those same books down our collective throat.”Flourish and BlottsI asked Oakes if she could elaborate on “the good stuff” by furnishing Millions readers with some recommendations for post-Hogwarts reading. “Middle schoolers love serial storytelling,” she said. “That is part of the success of the Harry Potter books. I can think of many recent series that have met with remarkable success: the Alex Rider series, the Warriors series, the Princess Diary series, the Eragon series, the Spiderwick Chronicles – to name a few off the top of my head. Students will request the next book in the series sometimes months in advance. Because of Amazon.com, they know approximately when the book will be published. We librarians are forced, more than ever, to stay on top of things. However, I can think of no other book or series that would compel students and parents to attend a midnight party in order to obtain the sequel. That is purely a Harry Potter thing. We’ve had kids counting down the days to publication since December.”I would love for kids to love J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, because they are such elegant writers. Certainly there are kids who read Tolkien and Lewis, and often prefer it, but it doesn’t follow that a Potter fan is automatically a Bilbo Baggins fan. Tolkien is much harder to read, for one thing, and the works of C.S. Lewis don’t feel as contemporary as Rowling’s do. The latest, coolest reading trend amongst my students is graphic novels.”When recommending a book to Potter enthusiasts, Oakes always asks, “What part of Harry Potter is your favorite part? The school, the family problems, the sports, horror, the magic…?” Then, she says, “I come up with some titles based on the answer. It’s surprising to me how often students want to read about boarding schools and about all things English… and I can’t resist recommending the great contemporary English author Hilary McKay. Read The Exiles and see if you can stop reading the rest of her work. It’s not fantasy, but it is quintessentially English.”She went on to offer a post-Hogwarts syllabus of fantasy books:Young Adult/Older ReadersUrsula K.Leguin. The Earthsea Cycle. (A quest series with wizards and dragons.)Patricia McKillup. The Riddle-Master of Hed. (A quest series with wizards and mysteries.)Garth Nix. The Abhorsen Trilogy. (A dark fantasy that features necromancy and romance.)Philip Pullman. His Dark Materials. (Parallel worlds that collide in Oxford. As much science-fiction as fantasy.)Middle ReadersLloyd Alexander. The Chronicles of Prydain. (A quest series with an oracular pig; highly recommended byThe Millions.)Eoin Colfer. Artemis Fowl. (Contemporary magic which relies on technology. Spies!)Diana Wynne Jones. The Chronicles of Chrestomanci. (Parallel worlds; magic; families in all their dysfunction and glory.)Jenny Nimmo. Children of the Red King. (Wizards go to a school quite different from Hogwarts!)”Many kids don’t want to be perceived as Potter groupies,” Oakes noted. “It’s interesting, though, how many will reluctantly pick one of the books up, then get sucked right in to the world Rowling has created. It is almost impossible to resist the spell of the Potter books. Having said that, I’ll be very curious to see how they age.”

In 1940, Joseph Mitchell published a New Yorker profile of “Bowery celebrity” Mazie P. Gordon, a career ticket-taker at the Venice movie theater whose charity toward drunken bums was as legendary as it was mysterious. Seventy years later, the profile came to the attention of novelist Jami Attenberg when her friend John McCormick named his bar Saint Mazie.

“He said she was the closest thing to a saint that he’d ever heard of,” Attenberg said. “So then I became interested in her, too, and did a bunch of research on her — although there’s not actually a lot to do.”

I met Attenberg in her Williamsburg apartment, a loft with an excellent view, a minimal kitchen, and a whole lot of books. Her dog, Sid, sat at our feet for the majority of the interview, and if you follow Attenberg on any of her online platforms (Twitter, TinyLetter, Tumblr, etc.), both Attenberg and Sid are pretty much as advertised: friendly, warm, curious, and easygoing. The only time Attenberg seemed even the slightest bit taken aback was when I asked her what made her think there was a novel in Mitchell’s profile “Mazie.”

“I thought there were like 10 novels in there! I mean, she was like, friends with Chinese gangsters. That is a novel. Like, right there. All of Joseph Mitchell’s work is one massive writing prompt. He’s so good at the most precise details and leaving a little mysterious edge to everything. So I read that and it was like, complete lift-off.”

Mazie came into Attenberg’s life when she was badly in need of lift-off. She was at a low point, having been dropped by her publisher for her poor sales record. She had managed to sell a fourth novel, The Middlesteins, to a new publisher, but she couldn’t afford to live in New York. To make ends meet, she sublet her loft and traveled around the country for seven months, staying with friends and family and occasionally renting cheap apartments. She wrote about this peripatetic time for The Rumpus, describing the period as one when she “questioned everything” in her life. It was also when she wrote an early draft of Saint Mazie.

Shortly after Attenberg returned to Brooklyn to reclaim her apartment, The Middlesteins was published, and it got the kind of slow, steady, word-of-mouth attention that authors dream of. Two-and-a-half months after it was first published, it appeared on the cover of The New York Times Book Review. Before Attenberg knew it, she was a bestselling author so busy with tour dates and promotional activities that she had very little time to write — the great irony of literary success.

The Middlesteins was my first introduction to Attenberg’s writing, and like many readers, I read it because someone — actually three people — recommended it. Without knowing much about the book, I was quickly drawn into Attenberg’s portrayal of a Midwestern Jewish family trying to hold things together when the parents divorce later in life, in part because of the mother’s self-destructive over-eating. The novel’s power is in its rapidly shifting perspectives. Just when you’ve settled in with one family member, Attenberg gives you a whole new point of view to incorporate. By the end of The Middlesteins, you feel as if you’ve gotten to know a real family, that you’ve had a chance to see their flaws and love them anyway.

Attenberg says the success of The Middlesteins was like “getting a promotion,” mentioning a few factors that may have contributed to its positive reception: a better marketing campaign, snappier cover design, and smarter placement in bookstores. Ultimately, though, she thinks it was just a better book. But how do writers get better at telling stories? Attenberg has some theories. First: getting older. She wrote The Middlesteins in her late-30s, with three books to her name and some perspective on the person who wrote them.

“I think when you’re writing your debut and your first couple books, you’re working out a lot of stuff from your younger life and you have to get through all of those things. You just have to work through it. And I did that in my first three books — and a couple books that I threw away that felt like retreads.

“And I finally got to a place where I had a little perspective and could take a step back, which to me, feels like The Middlesteins. With The Middlesteins I didn’t need to write a first person book anymore. With Mazie it feels like first person, but it’s actually a multitude.”

Attenberg also began a meditation practice in her late-30s, and her practice led her to come up with a set of rules for determining future book projects.

Attenberg’s first rule is that she has to be able to express empathy and compassion within the book; the second rule is that she has to be formally inventive, (i.e. she can’t rely on the same storytelling structures over and over); and the third rule is that her writing has to be accessible.

“So, a book has to have my personal spiritual moments, a complexity or a challenge to it, and then an accessibility. So when I arrive at a story that feels that way — and I think very deeply about these things when I’m approaching something — when I feel like something is those things, then I can write that book.”

Anyone who has read Attenberg’s fiction might sense these foundational rules. There’s a depth to Attenberg’s storytelling that sneaks up on you because her sentences go down so easily. As for her formal inventiveness, it’s well on display in her new novel Saint Mazie, which is a departure from everything she’s written before. Saint Mazie is a collage of voices taken from Mazie’s diary entries, postcards, scraps of Mazie’s unpublished memoir, and interviews with people who knew Mazie. Mazie’s voice is primary, and about half the novel consists of her plainspoken, melancholy diary entries, but there are also present-day voices, interviewed by an unseen documentarian, who provide historical information and personal anecdotes about Mazie. Some early reviews have complained that these outside voices are distracting, and there were times when I agreed, but it’s clear that Mazie’s life, with all its “mysterious edges,” needed some context, and Attenberg chose a structure that provides that.

Attenberg told me that, originally, she thought that Saint Mazie would be written entirely in Mazie’s voice. In her research, Attenberg learned that Mazie had, at one point, planned to write her memoirs. Whether or not they were ever written in anyone’s guess, but Attenberg couldn’t help imagining what those pages would sound like.

“My original proposal was actually 80 pages of [Mazie’s] memoir. Which you see little bits of in the book, but they ended up taking a different form.”

Attenberg hit a wall when she realized that there was a lot of research she couldn’t do. She found herself imagining the questions she would ask of the people who had known Mazie, the reporting she would do if only her friends and family were still available for comment. Eventually she realized she could just make up the interviews and put them in the book.

“It was one of those, I woke up in the middle of the night and realized, ‘Oh, why don’t I just invent them?’ Duh.”

Saint Mazie is, above all, a character study, a reach back to the past to examine the life a woman who lived with remarkable independence, verve, and compassion — a deeply good person who had no idea that her goodness was anything unusual. In interviews for The Middlesteins, Attenberg talked about the challenge of writing about people who weren’t immediately likeable. For Mazie, the challenge was to write about someone who is, as her friend put it, “the closest thing to a saint.”

“It was almost aspirational for me, writing this book,” Jami wrote to me, via email, after our interview. “Like if I could spend time getting to know this person, maybe I could learn how to be better myself.”